Something historic happened yesterday. Thanks to the interim Senate appointment of William ‘Mo’ Cowan in Massachusetts the United States Senate will for the first time ever have two African-Americans serving together, but only for a few months. This will bring African-American representation in the Senate to a historic 2 percent, even though they make up over 12 percent of the population.

This is another reminder of why the Senate is such a terrible institution. Not only is it governed by truly idiotic rules that cripple the federal government’s ability to function. It is also the most malapportioned legislative chamber in the entire ‘democratic’ world. The Senate vote of someone in Wyoming is worth 66 times more than that of a Californian. An imbalance of power so absurd that if it existed in any other country they would probably lose their ability to claim to be a democracy.

Since the low population states that hold disproportionate sway in the Senate are overwhelming white (Vermont, North Dakota, Idaho, Maine, Wyoming, etc…) it effectively guarantees that the United States Senate will never come even close to resembling the country’s population. Barring the systematic relocation of tens of millions of Americans, the design of the Senate assures African-Americans will forever be dramatically underrepresented in their government.

The Senate should be a source of national shame. The fact that it isn’t proves that any injustice allowed to exist long enough will not only be defended in the name of “tradition” but will actually be celebrated.

42 Responses
to “The United States Senate Is a Horrible Institution”

White’s elect black reps all the time. I am in the house district represented by Emmanuel Cleaver. It is a majority white district. I don’t feel that as a white person I am not represented by Mr. Cleaver.

Not saying whites will not vote for black people but there is an issue of probability. A state like Vermont where only 1 percent is African Americans is very unlikely to elect an African American senator simply because there is almost no possible candidates.

The Senate took an undemocratic structure and made it even moreso through its rules. It is a horrible institution because it has degenerated into a Washington DC private club completely divorced from the constituents (even in Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, and Oklahoma) that it purports to serve.

But the presence of the filibuster makes for convenient one-stop shopping by K-Street.

Senators represent the states from which they are elected, not the people per se. The House members represent the people. It is states that formed the Union and a sufficient number of those states insisted there be state representation so that on issues of common interests within the states the more populous states would not roll over the sparsely populated states. The purported inequity you identify is a feature not a bug.

John Kerry is right, there is nothing wrong with the Senate as an institution. The problem is the idiots we send there.

Jon, I support efforts to make the Congress more representative, but I wonder how much it really matters about the big state vs. small state argument for the Senate (newcarguy’s point about bicameral, for example, strikes me as quite astute).

In a sample size of only 50 states and 100 Senators, for every Wyoming and Kansas there’s basically a Hawaii and Delaware.

There isn’t a red team/blue team issue here; it’s basically a small state/big state issue, which doesn’t have nearly as much to do with racial politics specifically or legislative coalitions more generally.

Unless, of course, any state with less than, say, 1 million eligible voters wouldn’t get any Senators. That would be an interesting development.

Appreciate this comment, Jon makes a valid observation but really the Senate has historically been closer to the House of Lords from Old England than a check on the balance of power aiding the States with low populations as it was intended. It is now solely a millionaires club with open bribery allowed to direct legislation for the benefit of the status quo.

P.S., if anybody’s curious about my random idea, I would recognize that the original intent of the Senate was to represent the states, which were the building blocks for the Constitution.

But those building blocks have changed, and we are largely structured around city-states now.

So, if there was some chance of throwing everything out, I wouldn’t reapportion based upon state population. Rather, I’d use combined statistical areas or some such similar approach. So, for example, Denver’s Senator would serve Denver proper plus, say, Wyoming, while Minneapolis’ Senator would serve Minneapolis proper plus, say, North Dakota. Etc.

With not much difficulty, this would much better map actual social connections to DC and provide a mechanism for the major metro areas (NYC, Chi, LA, etc.) to be properly represented with multiple Senators without completely abandoning more sparsely populated areas.

[but of course, this all assumes the point of Congress is to legislate the will of the people...]

I recall when Ed Brooke was elected overwhelmingly as Sen from Mass. I think he was the first African American elected to the Senate, and virtually the lone member of the diversity pool there for years. He retired long ago and must be way into his 90s by now, if indeed he hasn’t passed on.

For those who think ethnic, racial, cultural, and gender identity is of paramount importance, I think that would likely be an unfortunate urge for symbolism over substance. Still it begs the valid question of why more minorities aren’t running for the Senate. I don’t think the House is short changed by comparison.

Certainly one would expect a diversity-rich candidate from MA Dems to run for the seat vacated be John Kerry — but it seems that won’t happen. Instead it’ll be just Lynch and Markey fighting it out against Brown.
So it isn’t just small states ganging up on the larger or bluer ones.

Could Frank beat wonderboy Scott Brown in a special election? Warren prevailed with the sizeable turnout of a Presential Election (among other reasons). I’m just curious as to who has the best chance to hold the seat for the Dems since Lurch is now Sec. of STate.

A majority-minority district is a United States congressional district in which the majority of the constituents in the district are racial or ethnic minorities (as opposed to white non-Hispanics).

Majority-minority districts are often the result of racial gerrymandering. Some view majority-minority districts as a way to dilute the voting power of minorities and analogous to racial segregation; others favor majority-minority districts as ways to effectively ensure the election of a minority member of Congress to the House of Representatives.

It would be hard to gerrymander a whole state into a majority-minority configuration.

Heh, they haven’t used “film” since the 1900′s. You should update your whole statement too. Snow is “proof global warming is a hoax by liberals” and water is only drinkable after removing the fracking chemicals and burning off the gas.

You say that the House comes close with roughly 10% of its members African American, which is true. But 26 of the house districts with black Representatives are black majority districts.

The other 17 black Representatives come from white majority districts. So 17 of 435 comes closer to 4%

One more point. There is one white Representative in one of the 27 black majority districts which also comes to about 4%. It turns out majority white districts vote in black Representatives at about the same rate as majority black districts vote in white Representatives.

This will bring African-American representation in the Senate to a historic 2 percent, even though they make up over 12 percent of the population.

How do you propose we remedy this? Hold out a percentage of seats for blacks that is proportionate to their overall percentage of the population? Have a “blacks only” ballot with only black candidates that only black voters can use?

Blacks aren’t even represented proportionately in the House. The only solution to that is to gerrymand even more black congressional districts.

And even if we adopt a system of proportionate representation, who’s to say things would change?

.” Examine the federal government and you find ‘elements of democracy’ or perhaps a ‘primitive’ or ‘proto-democracy’. The electoral college hardly qualifies as a ‘democratic’ institution. so 1 of the three branches isn’t ‘full on’ democratic. The senate, please. There’s 1/2 of the legislative branch being not recognizably ‘democratic’ in the sense of one person, one vote, one value, one official. The Supreme Court, approved by the Senate is disqualified as a ‘democratic’ institution. Leaving only the House which has what seems to be a majority of ‘gerrymandered’ i.e. rotten borough districts. So saying we live in a ‘democracy’ is an opinion and thus contestable rather than a fact. Add the presence of corrupting influences such as lobbyists and campaign bribes err contributions and the argument of ‘we live in a democracy’ weakens further by any plausible metric. Combine that with the unequal treatment and smothering of third parties by denying ballot access via legislative fiat and the argument of ‘lack of democracy’ becomes solid enough to have to confront or concede that the ‘not really a democracy’ at the federal level is manifest. Similar, though less potent arguments are available against ‘democracy at the state level’ and so on down to the city council and town board.

Now that is the truth and makes caring about Representative Democracy issues moot for the time being doesn’t it? So vote third party and hold your head high in the soup line and say hi to the Obamabots standing with you.

Unfortunately, Democracy isn’t sustainable in any sense. I think eventually future generations will realize that it’s better to put government in the hands of a few experts than the easily swayed masses. Something similar to what the Chinese do now is likely the framework of future governments.

After all, there’s a reason that monarchies evolved out of the egalitarian tribal societies … not everyone is fit to determine their own fate, let alone the destiny of others.

Disagree with that in the sense that humans are evolving and what didn’t work a thousand years ago or even what isn’t working today can’t be projected to not work for future generations. Right now in America if we were run by majority rule life would be much better if not for all definitely for the greatest number of people.
Propaganda keeps the masses from knowing the truth and deciding on actual issues rather than ginned up wedge issues. This aristocracy is bent on it’s own destruction by the greed and avarice that got them where they are. Present times are troubling and I’m one who thinks it will get worse before it gets better but it will get better and people like you and I are proof. Individuals make wrong decisions, so do governments (of all types) and so do and will democracies but we have to learn from the mistakes and remember them.

Like so many other parts of the Constitution, the Senate is an anachronism which now only serves to perpetuate a corrupt, imperial system. More often than not, it is a vestigial organ.

The House, which has not increased its number of members even though the U.S. population has substantially increased, is no better. Gerrymandering has smade the House a joke, beyond the stupidity and foolishness of so many of its members. Having 435 people represent more than 310 million people is even more absurd.

Most absurd of all, of course, is allowing the legalized bribery of corporate and lobby funds to write legislation affecting the lives of 310 million USans as well as billions of people abroad, and still calling this a “democracy”. An Inverted Totalitarian State which depends on a global Empire of hyper-violence and mass murder is what the US truly is. Any “reforms” of the House and Senate amount to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as we head for the iceberg of catastrophic climate chaos.

The question is…What do we do once the Titanic sinks? Sure we can blame the Captain but we need to build a new ship with a better system for all. But I agree with everything you said. The masses might be asses but they are not that bad and the new system might not come from America the land of the free (market).

Actually, the greatest progress has been made when the officials went against the will of the people. Medicare, Civil Rights, female suffrage … never would have gained the support of the majority of Americans. Even now, if the gay marriage proposal went up to popular vote and all Americans participated … it would lose, same story with keeping abortion legal.

Propaganda may play a role, but the vast majority of people are just having what they already believe reinforced. Scientists at Yale (I believe) found that people overestimate their own intelligence and favor those who reinforce their prejudices, seeing them as smarter. Most people just don’t have the ability to see long range or a bigger picture, but they still have a say. Europe and Asia have found ways to circumvent this destructive will, largely by just by burying certain points and acting like they don’t exist.

I think government will evolve to a system similar to that of China, where experts are essentially invited into the government and appointed by the ruling party to certain positions. Chinese society has made rapid progress since then, both socially and economically.

The masses, even with presented with the Truth, ignore it. That’s what happened with Occupy, the people heard their arguments but sided with the people who they perceived to be like them.

Most people are content to sit at home and let others run the show anyway, as long as they’re not out on the streets, have some sort of entertainment and not starving. I imagine that is the way it will always be, so why fight it?

21st-century westerners have decided that history doesn’t matter, isn’t relevant. This is part of why ‘murkans tell you we have a “democratic” gov’t (whatever that means), are shocked when they learn that the executive has powers analogous to a monarch and don’t realize we have a mixed constitution (think Rome during the republic) in which the Senate represents the aristocracy. Y’all do realize that senators were originally elected by state legislators, right?

It’s intentionally anti-democratic. Think about that.

BTW, monarchies have not “evolved out of egalitarian tribal societies”; only civilizations have ever featured what can be called a monarch.

Re: democracy-Athens was just fine until Pericles and his set seized power a la executives. Within two generations Athens had been savaged in a pointless 25-year war provoked by the new Athenian grandees, lost their trade empire and were broke. They had even sold the golden plates of armor on the statue of Athena in the Parthenon to pay mercenaries.

Gotta learn about democracy and political history in general before coming with a broadside like: “Democracy isn’t sustainable in any sense.”

I wonder what issues there are that are such a problem for the sparsely populated states? Say, regulating guns? The big states, where the deaths are happening, are paying the price for the lunatic gun fringe. Tell me again why this is a good thing?

Back in the founding father days when 95% of people were farmers and mostly illiterate it made more sense to check the power of the highly populated States but now it is just abused by the uber wealthy.

The Senate is an abomination and needs to be abolished, but the House is too damn small. The original intent was 1 Representative for each 30,000 in population; under that formula, we would have 10,000 Representatives today.

If we followed the formula in Article the First (the unratified proposed First Amendment to the Constitution), which called for gradually expanding the population/representative ratio, we would have 2500-5000 Representatives.

If we applied the formula from the Reapportionment Act of 1911 (the last time Congress expanded the House), where the ration was 1/212,000 citizens, we would have about 1050 Representatives. (The Republican majority in 1921 refused to pass any Reapportionment Act to account for the 1920 Census, and in 1929 capped the House membership at 435.)

In Federalist No. 55, James Madison lays out the dangers of having too few Representatives serving too many Constituents:

[F]irst, that so small a number of representatives will be an unsafe depositary of the public interests; secondly, that they will not possess a proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents; thirdly, that they will be taken from that class of citizens which will sympathize least with the feelings of the mass of the people, and be most likely to aim at a permanent elevation of the few on the depression of the many

An overlooked reason (haven’t read all the comments here yet, but, I feel pretty sure that it’s happened again ) why the flyover state Senators are so consistently horrible is that, being from smaller population states, which are small beer economically, is that these Senators are always easily bought by out of state corporations and multinationals, ie by Big Bizniss. It’s this simple: there’s a lot less money floating around out there in Kornsas and Potadoho, hence the corporate dollar goes further, buys more Senator out there.

Why is Max Baucus of Montana the champion of the Insurance Cartel? Montana isn’t the home state of the Insurance Cartel. It’s because he is bought by the Cartel. Max Baucus was paid more by the protection racket kneecappers of Connecticut than any other Senator. He used his funding to keep getting returned to office, he gained seniority and took the Chairmanship of the Finance Committee, where he returned all the favors to his corporate godfathers in the form of the ACA, a federally backed welfare gravy train just for them that will pay off in perpetuity. It will take forever to undo the damage “Montana’s” Senator did to the country as a whole. But he didn’t do it for Montana, nor because Montanans are some fucked up hillbillies. He did it for La Famiglia back east.

It’s not that Connecticut’s Senators aren’t going to be shameless and effective whores for health insurance companies, too, or that NY’s Senators won’t be shameless whores for banks, or that Kansas’ Senators won’t be shameless whores for ADM and Conagra. They will be. They don’t even have to be bribed in many cases since the association of their states with those interests involves thousands of jobs and therefore votes. But the Iron Grip by special interest lobbies on the Senate and Congress gains its full, unbreakable strength from the piling on of Senators and Reps from states that have no such obvious and natural connection to the protected Lobby in question. Their assistance is secured with bribes called campaign donations. A challenger candidate from that state who doesn’t have these kind of deep pocketed corporate sponsors behind him or her has little chance. Thus the incumbent Senator from the little state with the Big corporate sponsorship keeps coming back to Washingon, and coming back and coming back and all the while gaining in seniority, until he has more say in important polcies than even the President of the United States.

It’s so easy for Big Money lobbyists to purchase Senators from flyover country to cover their flanks that it’s irrational to expect them ever stop doing that. And it hardly matters who runs, or who runs against the made men, once their Big Money sponsorship is well established.

So you could make it a law that ALL these flyover state Senators henceforth have to be black, or Chinese or vegetarian or whatever– but guess what? Nothing will change. Not a fucking thing. You’ll have a Senate full of Harold Fords and Barack Obama’s invoking MLK as they destroy unions, as they pass Free Trade treaties with foreign despots to benefit corporate interests using slave labor, and as they sell their Midwest and Mountain state’s voters, along with everyone else, into a form of permanent debt servitude to corporations headquatered “back east”. Granted that last one has already happened in the form of RobamneyCare, but don’t think they aren’t thinking of fresh atrocities along the same lines. It won’t be long til someone comes up with a “bold innovative initiative” for “public private partnership” in the field of Medicare or Social Security.

The special role of MONEY in the Senate is why it is so hostile to democracy and cannot be reformed no matter how you change the “look” of the place. The President has a veto, but the Senate has, in effect, one hundred vetoes. Most of them are up for sale to the high(est) bidders, so corporate interests will continue to buy and continue to rule via the Senate.

Interesting Madison. But the optimum number of representatives would change over time along with improved information technology as well as burgeoning population. Info tech would mitigate the population burden to a large degree.

I’m not convinced, then, that we need thousands more reps. Maybe 435 is enough and as locally knowledgeable nowadays as much higher number would be. At 435 there would be some advantage in each rep personally knowing most of the others at least in passing. Going much larger at some point there’d be diminishing returns.

There are plenty of problems with the House, though. But are they driven by having too few members ?

I would love to see what would happen with a CA initiative directing the CA Legislature to pass a “delete-the-US-Senate” US constitutional amendment.

The idea would be not to go for the brass ring, i.e., passing a state-started US Const amendment, but merely to pass a directive to the Legislature. I’m 99% this is a valid and legal thing to put in a CA initiative.

The directive would be much easier to pass, and would possibly scare the shit out of the Reids and Feinsteins and pals, and possibly get them to do things like fix the filibuster, the secret holds, the confirmation processes, etc.